The Collective

by Don Lee (Norton)

In the opening pages of Lee’s smart, subdued third novel, Eric Cho, a Korean-American college freshman, is accused by a friend of being a “banana”—yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The accuser, Joshua Yoon, is Korean-American, too—a budding writer, self-styled identity-politics expert, and supreme narcissist. Joshua is obsessed with race, and acutely critical of mainstream representations of Asians, which he dubs “orientalist masturbatory fantasy figures.” After graduation, he organizes an artists’ collective, an “Asian version of Bloomsbury,” hoping to “deform and reform the stereotypes”—a project that has unexpected consequences. Lee, a third-generation Korean-American, is obviously familiar with the complexity of identity fixation, and his characters ultimately discover the danger of becoming martyrs to a cause. ♦

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